The Council that reached the people with immediate effect was that of the media, not that of the Fathers.
We know that this Council of the media was accessible to everyone. Therefore, this was the dominant one, the more effective one, and it created so many disasters, so many problems, so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy … and the real Council had difficulty establishing itself and taking shape; the virtual Council was stronger than the real Council. But the real force of the Council was present and, slowly but surely, established itself more and more and became the true force which is also the true reform, the true renewal of the Church. It seems to me that, 50 years after the Council, we see that this virtual Council is broken, is lost, and there now appears the true Council with all its spiritual force.
Three days after announcing his abdication, Pope Benedict XVI spoke these words to the Roman Curia.
It must have been weighing heavily on his mind, in part surely because of his own contribution to the Second Vatican Council.
His central thesis, that the media determined the Vatican Council’s application, is a reality that many liberals in the church refused to confront. There are priests and nuns who will tell you that they never read the documents, but applied changes based upon what the media were reporting about the council. This applies to everything from Communion in the Hand, to the liturgy, to architecture, to dress codes, to ecumenism. Critics of the Council will argue that some of these things were implicit or even explicit in the documents, yet this does not change the fact that it was still the media that determined what transpired afterwards.
This was the worst sort of elitism, allowing journalists and clerics to override a council which should have been pastoral in purpose and in application. Instead, as Benedict said: so much suffering: seminaries closed, convents closed, banal liturgy.
After much excitement and optimism and after very positive reports from those who attended local Synodal meetings, the Irish Synod has completely deflated all those who took part in the process so far by discrediting their voices in favour of what appears to have been predicted by the process’s worst critics, that is the appearance that many aspects of the Synodal reports were written in advance and discounted the actual conversations that took place in parishes.
To make it worse, with the Synodal Synthesis reports still sinking in, the National Pre Synodal Assembly took place in Athlone. According to their website, those in attendance included:
Delegates from the 26 dioceses on the island of Ireland; Religious Congregations; representatives from other Catholic groups and lay ecclesial associations; members of the clergy; members of the Synodal Pathway Steering Committee and Task Group.
As it panned out, former journalist Ursula Halligan of We Are Church and Father Tony Flannery of the Fine Gael linked Association of Catholic Priests were among those invited to attend. Their voices were of course heard and broadcast, while the average parishioner who spoke at the various parish level gatherings had their voice muted, interpreted through the magical Kafkaesque process of Synod Synthesis documents.
The Virtual Synod was underway.
There are two elements to this, firstly the Synodal Synthesis reports and secondly the media representations of these reports.
In almost all of the Synod Synthesis reports, there is a synchronised pattern of mentioning people in their second marriages, ‘LGBTQ+’ and the role of women, which then extended in many cases to calling for the ordination of woman as priestesses.
There is also what appears to be a concerted effort to omit lay men from these discussions, with some reports not mentioning men even once while mentioning women dozens of times, many of the few that do mention men lump all men into one category, as though lay men have the same authority as ordained priests. This is despite the fact that lay men are the least engaged societal group in the Irish Catholic Church, their absence from these reports is due to the fact that they are more scarce than people in their second marriages, ‘LGBTQ+’ or lay women.
One of the most bizarre comments was in the Kildare and Leighlin report, which appears to castigate respondents for failing to be concerned with social justice and climate issues, which apparently they should have been.
In reviewing all the submissions across parish meetings, online surveys and focus groups it was noteworthy that while the issues of social justice and care of the earth are central to Catholic teaching these did not feature highly in responses. On the one hand, we know that these are likely to be important issues for people. This is evidenced by people’s responses to social appeals and the leadership of young people on climate action. On the other hand, these issues do not appear to be overtly linked to the work and ministry of the Church.
The reason for such a large discrepancy between what people discussed at parishes and what was published appears to be because of online responses, which appear to have had a higher representation of younger people, younger people who did not attend the consultations in a church setting for some reason.
Bishop Denis Nulty stated that this was ‘‘This is a report written by the people of God about the Church as they see it’’. Only, the official Synthesis guidelines from the Vatican state: ‘From a synodal perspective, it makes sense for a group to draft the synthesis, in which it might be appropriate to involve the synod team. Other members of the drafting group could be chosen based on their condition (age, sex, state of life), geographical or cultural origin, experience and/or competence in different fields (sacred sciences, human and social sciences, textual editing, etc.), with particular attention to the presence of people capable of listening to and understanding the voice of minorities, the poor and the excluded. Similarly, it will be important to ensure the presence of a smaller core group (e.g., 2-3 people) with expertise in writing, to whom the task of drafting can be materially entrusted’. A group has spoken of their interpretation.
Dublin Archdiocese went one further, stating that it was not ‘the people of God’, nor a ‘group’, but ‘The Spirit’.
The official guidelines actually tell those involved with drafting to give a higher importance to those from an outsider perspective:
The reading of the materials collected should be carried out in an atmosphere of prayer and discernment, keeping in mind the context and culture from which they come. Starting from their own experience and expertise, those who participate in this phase try to identify the following in the materials they read:
What interesting, innovative, enlightening elements emerge with respect to the question guiding the synodal journey?
What obstacles, difficulties or concerns are pointed out? What causes are indicated?
As the work proceeds, attention should be paid to:
common trends on which some consensus (not necessarily unanimous);
discordant points of view and voices that are "out of tune" or marginal, which highlight differences within the People of God; it is fundamental not to lose track of them, because the process of discernment could recognize them as prophetic voices that indicate what the Spirit is asking of the Church.
After all of the Irish Dioceses had published these reports, it then came to the event in Athlone. The media reporting of the Synodal Synthesis reports, which had been muted til then, went into overdrive.
One of the headlines:
Most Irish Catholics want ordination of women and marriage for priests - Irish Times
The article opened with:
They also want better-prepared, shorter sermons and the removal of bloodthirsty Old Testament readings from Masses and other liturgies. according to a survey of tens of thousands of believers across the church’s 26 dioceses on the island.
Nobody from the Synodal Committee corrected this by stating that the numbers of Catholics consulted was nowhere near a majority and that the results themselves were being told to highlight outsider opinions rather than the majority. The slur on the Old Testament was particularly brazen, yet the media inept Irish church appeared to have no qualms with allowing it to go uncorrected.
In the absence of communication from the Synodal Steering Committee themselves, most people will now assume that this is true.
Most importantly, although this is only an early stage in the process, with a year until the Universal Synod and four years until the Irish Synod, there is no doubt that the media efforts to demoralise and influence Catholics will be successful if those who actually attend parish Synodal consultations in their churches are ignored in favour of sporadic surveys filled in within 4 minutes by a teenager, probably at the behest of a youth group leader or teacher or grandparent.
If those involved with the Synod want to maintain trust in the process, they need to assure people that their earnest voices will be heard over those of journalists and over those who flippantly fill in online surveys. Liberal voices in the church have repeatedly touted the corrupt ‘Citizen’s Assembly’ process favoured by Fine Gael, who are heavily linked to liberal priest cabals in Ireland. The Citizen’s Assembly involved Fine Gael handpicking samples and pretending that these were representative of the population as a whole, miraculously always getting the result that they wanted and then calling a Referendum.
This past week, Pope Francis has mocked the German Synodal process by stating that ‘We don’t need two Evangelical Churches in Germany’.
Even notoriously liberal Cardinal Walter Kasper has come out strongly against the German model in a powerful new essay. He writes of how the German church which he grew up in had hoped to revitalise the faith:
Today, the Church is dying in many souls. But at that time after the end of the war, when Germany was not only physically but also morally in ruins, the time of the post-flowering of the ecclesiastical youth movement was between the two world wars; it was the time of the liturgical movement and the Bible movement. We were shaped – and it still does shape me – by the motto of the new way of life in Christ. We wanted a renewal of the Church from Jesus Christ.
He continues to point out that the Bishop is important to the Synod and should not abdicate his role, even describing the current German process as a coup d’etat:
Early Christianity established three criteria, three pillars, as it were. The symbolism, the creed that we still speak in the Creed today, the canon of Sacred Scripture and the episcopate. The episcopate thus became the cornerstone of the old Church, which is still common to all churches of the first millennium in East and West. Whoever saws on this pillar breaks the neck of the church.
I know nobody wants that – but in fact it happens. In fact, the bishops can no longer exercise the task and authority assigned to them. If, in an act of voluntary commitment, they voluntarily renounce it and declare to follow the decisions of the Synod or the future Synodal Council.
I consider this idea of a voluntary commitment to be a trick – and therefore a lazy trick. At best, the current bishops could commit themselves to their own person, but not to their successors. Imagine a civil servant who allows himself to be appointed and then renounces the exercise of his legal duties. A legal procedure would be certain for him. Ultimately, such a voluntary commitment would be tantamount to a collective resignation of the bishops. Constitutionally, the whole thing could only be described as a coup, i.e. an attempted coup d'état.
So: the episcopate does not go without a synod and the synod does not go without a bishop. It must strengthen and support the bishop and keep his back free. At the same time, it can prevent an abusive and arbitrary exercise of the authority of the bishop. A strong synod needs a strong bishop, and a strong bishop can only live up to his leadership responsibility with a strong synod. The synodal structure is the ecclesiastical form of the separation of powers in the Church.
The ending of his lecture is particularly poignant, warning of self appointed prophets. We may stand corrected, but it seems as though he is talking about the type of language seen in the Dublin Synodal Synthesis, which proudly boasts of ‘The Spirit’ moving people to talk about certain issues. Such unverified claims are not mere literary devices, they are dangerous assumptions of authority that border on blasphemy.
Kasper says:
Recently, a church historian rightly reminded me that in difficult situations in church history, the synods have contributed to renewal; but they were never the real source of renewal. This was mostly based on individual Christians, men and women gripped by the Holy Spirit. Already at the first Council, the Synod of Nicea (325), it was a young deacon, Athanasius, who was there as secretary of his bishop and who played the decisive role.
Later, they were each tall, holy women and men. After the catastrophe of Good Friday, it was a woman, Mary Magdalene, who shook up the shy apostles, gathered only behind closed doors, and who had to put Peter and John on their toes. Later, St. Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Joan of Arc, and many other great women are to be mentioned. Most of them were founders of the order: Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis and Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola, Charles de Foucauld and others.
In short, we must not ignore the prophetic-charismatic dimension. But no one can make himself a prophet. Whoever tries to do so can only be a false prophet. Prophets are reviled and persecuted. Think of the laments of the prophet Jeremiah. Ultimately, the leadership of the Church lies with the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, we can only pray that such prophetic figures will be given to us again and again.
I am convinced that we will find a renewal of the Church from the crisis in which we find ourselves. I do not know who, not when and how the Church will awaken again as a Church in souls. I also don't know if I will experience it myself. We cannot make the renewal, but it will come. God is faithful.
In response to the German Synod, Pope Francis has said:
What is happening is that there are a lot of pressure groups, and under pressure it is not possible to discern. The fact that there are different points of view is fine. The problem is when there is pressure. That does not help.
Will the Synod heed the warnings of Benedict XVI, Francis and even Kasper, or will it allow journalists and pressure groups to triumph by virtue of their accessibility and power?
As Cardinal Kasper writes, no one can make himself a prophet. Whoever tries to do so can only be a false prophet.
We have optimism that God’s voice will be the one that is ultimately heard, but those steering the Synod need to listen to those who actually love the faith and who actually take the time to attend these consultations.
In 2018, the church allowed pro abortion campaigners to order hundreds of thousands (yes, that many) of tickets for the Pope’s Mass in the Phoenix Park that they never had any intention of attending. The result was humiliation, images of a field that looked empty (despite a large crowd of close to 100,000) with Catholics being taunted with yet another humiliation only months after losing the Referendum to Protect the Right to Life.
Perhaps it is time to get the act together and not get fooled again by media campaigns, lobby groups and absurdly skewed results from online surveys.
You can read all of Cardinal Kasper’s lecture here Synodality and renewal of the Church | New beginning (neueranfang.online)
